• Living hungry in the land of plenty

    I work with people of meager means, but you don’t have to work with the poor to know this is a particularly harsh time. Maybe you already know recessions are doubly hard on the poor. Maybe you already know social services are cut back at the moment when they’re needed most. Maybe you even saw a column in the NYT the other day which describes the problem better than I ever could.

    Maybe we’re cut from different political cloth and you find political solutions distasteful, but you’d like to do something.

    This might be a good start. Or this. Some folks found some of their recent campaigns controversial, but maybe this would be a good start too.

  • Many, MANY thanks

    Like many of you we’ve had some money worries. With Cheryl down to her last week of saved up sick leave, her doctors saying she’ll be out of work until at least April, the bills mounting, attorneys not taking our calls anymore, and the odious application process for disability insurance (private mind you) taking FOREVER (it’s way more complicated than it should be), we’ve been a little concerned about our revenue stream.

    I’m pleased to say we’re not so worried anymore. One of Cheryl’s coworkers just donated 400 hours of sick leave, and that was before her HR department got around to advertising a request for donated hours. In case you’re not aware, State of Florida employees (when they’re “vested” ) are eligible to cash in one quarter of the value of their sick leave when they leave. Needless to say, 400 hours is potentially a lot of money – even at one quarter of the value.

    I hear the person in question is thinking about leaving anyway, and may not have any use for the hours. Still, we are humbled and grateful. I don’t know this person, but if you’re out there you have my sincerest thanks. You’re a bright spot in what can be (at times) a cynical world.

  • That long? Really?

    In December 1998 I uploaded a few files to AOL’s servers, giving the world (ah hem… my sister) the first glimpse of my writing and photography (such as it was).

    My web site has gone through a lot of design changes since then. I began with a copy of BBEdit, writing up simple html by hand. From there I graduated to Adobe Pagemill, GoLive, back to hand coding very briefly, to iWeb, and my current blend of iWeb and minor tweaks.

    My site has survived changes in addresses and servers. Its content was split up between different servers, put back together on a single server, and split up again (with the arrival of cool web services like Flickr). It has gone from servers at AOL, to (the company formerly known as) GTE, Time Warner, Earthlink, a small company I can’t recall, and Go Daddy (in spite of their commercials, it’s founder, and my better judgement). It even lived here for a while, using a great dynamic DNS service to cope with the changing IP addresses assigned by my ISP. It started out on one of the first iMacs – two of them in fact. One of them fell in the line of duty… my poor bondi blue little buddy, but otherwise they soldiered on reliably, 24/7. The only reason I ever rebooted ’em was for software upgrades.

    Along the way I’ve gone to war with several Movable Type installations, euthanized a Berkley DB (the default database platform for Movable Type back in the day), fought the good fight with MySQL, tried WordPress for a little while, then settled in with WordPress for the long haul.

    Cheryl likes to say we had a blog before there was a word for it, but I’m not going quite that far.

    Through all the changes and hours of tender loving care, it’s been up continuously since its AOL days… now more than ten years ago. There aren’t many things in my life, outside of family, I’ve committed ten years to. This entry wasn’t meant to impress you with my technical savvy. High school students could do this in their sleep. I just can’t believe it’s been ten years.